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Openness policy stymied from the top

Marc Moncrief

Former finance minister Lindsay Tanner ... launched the set of policies to revolutionalise transparency in government. Photo: Craig Abraham

A THREE-YEAR-OLD policy to revolutionise transparency in government is struggling from a lack of leadership at the highest levels, the federal information commissioner has warned.

A review by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner calls for political leaders to force cultural change in the public service or risk being left behind by peer countries with more open governments.

It says the government should require, rather than just suggest, that so-called ''high value'' information be published openly on the central website created for the purpose more than two years ago, data.gov.au.

The Information Commissioner, John McMillan, contrasted the site, which hosts about 1200 datasets voluntarily released by government agencies, to similar efforts in peer countries. The US, Britain, the European Union and many others have released tens of thousands of datasets that were previously tightly guarded by individual agencies as part of a global movement to encourage innovation and transparency in their economies.

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''What is the difference?'' he asked. ''The only explanation can be that there is a stronger imperative. They [government agencies] haven't got clear messages from the top.''

The data.gov.au site was one of the crowning achievements of a review undertaken during the prime ministership of Kevin Rudd to encourage more openness in the public service. The site has, however, struggled with issues of poor design and resistance from some government agencies that prefer to control their data internally.

The information commissioner's report calls for the site to be redeveloped with substantial improvements. ''The next step would be the articulation by government of a clear policy requiring agencies to publish high-value datasets on data.gov.au,'' the report reads.

A set of policies developed in consultation with a federal inquiry led by an economist, Nicholas Gruen, and launched by the then finance minister, Lindsay Tanner, included a statement of openness in government and a dictum that information should be managed ''as a national resource'' by default, rather than as property of the government agency that generated it. It ordained that, except in particular circumstances, government data should be published under Creative Commons licensing, with liberal rights for users.

The information commission review found that, nearly three years after the policy was adopted, about two-thirds of government agencies have failed to adopt the new licensing regime.

''Open licensing, and the use of Creative Commons licences as a default position, requires an important cultural shift by Australian government agencies,'' the review states. ''A shift of this kind requires active agency leadership to support the change.''

The review found about 30 per cent of government agencies struggled with the shift to publishing under an open licence, rather than a strict copyright, as a default. It was about as likely for those agencies to say cost was the biggest barrier as it was for them to say their own internal culture caused the problem.